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Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley: Review

Tessa Hadley (“The London Train”) is wonderful at surprising us with the domestic dramas that stir the embers of everyday life. In her seventh book, we follow Stella, a self-proclaimed “clever girl,” from her Bristol childhood in the 1950s and ’60s to the present.

Her reminiscences can resemble little bombs: “My mother and I lived alone. My father was supposed to be dead, and I only found out years later that he’d left, walked out when I was 18 months old.” Yet the signs were all there — no photographs, no fond mentions of his name, no keepsakes.

Years later, the mother of two sons — their different fathers absent from her life — Stella seems to have repeated her mother’s pattern, minus her mother’s yearning for respectability. Times have changed that much, at least.

Finally curious, Stella locates a man that shares her father’s name, a driving instructor. Without revealing her suspicions, she takes lessons from this man, who may or may not be her Dad. They are both pleased; she proves an excellent driver.

Thank goodness, for the question of who is driving events in Stella’s life is paramount. Born into an era when “shame, and secrecy, the fear that other people would worm themselves into your weaknesses. . . would eat you from the inside,” she experiments, like many in her generation, with freedom and fearlessness. But her first, cataclysmic, romance leaves her emotionally wary.

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Shocked by her near-innocent teen pregnancy with the druggy upper-class Valentine (class hovers, cloud-like, over all these characters), Stella is quite alone when Val abruptly disappears, ignorant of her condition. In one of the book’s best episodes, Stella, who realized she was “clever” only a few years previously — after solving a physics problem that stumped her stepfather — acknowledges the bitter truth: not so clever after all.

But she’s a fierce and loving mother, seizing help when it is offered: working as a cook-housekeeper at a private school, joining a commune where her second child is born, taking part-time jobs, deferring her dreams of books and university. Stella’s commune memories may seem familiar to today’s anarchists or their boomer parents — the lofty ideals, the political arguments, the men who “did try to help with the housework” (perfect, that), the educated Marxists doing politically-correct factory work. Badly.

Watching her sleeping son’s face “beautifully clear, emptied of the busy day, cheeks flushed, arms thrown out across the pillow,” young Stella embodies loving motherhood. But Hadley can make even English weather seem enthralling: “Outside it rained steadily and persuasively, drenching the gardens; the smells of wet grass and rain steaming off the hot tar road, mingled with the incense we burned in the house and the musty carpets.” It can’t last, nor does it.

Growing up is hard to do. But after devouring the “less good” Victorian novels — “I didn’t condemn the ideals of sacrifice, I could see how they would work as a way of getting through the day, dressing drudgery up as a poignant adventure, putting the whole burden of freedom onto the poor men” — she attends university and regains her path. Her later decades, though never boring — she finds a solid husband, albeit someone else’s, and chooses fulfilling work — can read as more workmanlike than her younger years.

We last see Stella behind the wheel, driving to her comfortable home with her older husband and their daughter, whom they’ve adopted from her less-than-capable mother. “Some dark shape — a cat or a fox — flows across the road for an instant. . . I switch on the headlights and the car seems to leap forward into the night.” Good driving, Stella. Your father — was that him? would be proud.

Nancy Wigston is a freelance writer in Toronto

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